“Vernon God Little”

click to purchase Theme The book satirizes trailer park residents, the media, and most of all, those who believe that life in the United States is just like what they see on the TV news. The Booker Prize judges described it as a “coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with America”. The character of Vernon as a troubled teenager has drawn comparisons with the character Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ novel. The book is written in contemporary vernacular – with the use of foul satirical language and a witty irony. The town in which Vernon lives, Martirio, is the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese word for martyrdom. Book overview “If Huckleberry Finn were set on the Mexican-American border and written by the creators of South Park, it might read something like this.”-San Francisco Chronicle When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff’s office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday’s underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico. Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funny look at violence, materialism, and the American media. Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel A New York Times Notable Book A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year DBC Pierre is the pen name of Peter Finlay, who was born in Australia in 1961 and divided most of the first twenty-three years of his life between Texas and Mexico City. He lives in Ireland. Review Editorial Review – Reed Business Information, Inc (c) 2003 Pierre takes a freewheeling, irreverent look at teenage Sturm und Drang in his erratic, sometimes darkly comic debut novel about a Texas boy running from the law in the wake of a gory school shooting. Vernon Gregory Little is the 15-year-old protagonist, a nasty, sarcastic teenager accused of being an accessory to the murders committed by his friend Jesus Navarro in tiny Martirio, “the barbecue sauce capital of Texas.” Vernon manages to make bail and avoid the media horde that descends on the town after the killings, but he’s unable to get to the other gun-his father’s-which he knows will tie him to the crime, despite his innocence. His flight path takes him first to Houston, where he unsuccessfully tries to hook up with gorgeous former schoolmate Taylor Figueroa; the crafty beauty, promised a media job by the evil Lally, who’s also duped Vernon’s mom, follows him to Mexico and efficiently betrays him. Most of the plotting feels like an excuse for Vernon’s endless, sharply snide riffs on his small town and the unique excesses of America that helped spawn the killings. Unfortunately, Vernon’s voice grows tiresome, his excesses make him rather unlikable and the over-the-top, gross-out humor is hit-or-miss. Pierre’s wild energy offers entertaining satire as well as cringe-provoking scenes, and though he can write with incisive wit, this is a bumpy ride. Publication Formerly an artist, cartoonist, photographer and filmmaker, and later accused of being a conman and thief following the wild, drug-fuelled international rampage of his twenties, Pierre wrote the novel in London after a period of therapy, personal reconstruction and unemployment. He states the novel was a reaction to the culture around him, which after his own reorientation in life seemed to be full of the same delusional behaviours and self-entitlements which brought his own earlier downfall. The book was originally drafted as the first part of a trilogy which his UK publisher advised against, but which Pierre has loosely pursued in two subsequent works set ‘in the presence of death’, and dealing with contemporary, media-infected themes: Ludmila’s Broken English (2006), and the final part of the End Times Trilogy, Lights Out In Wonderland (2010). This third book follows to their conclusion many of the questions underlying Vernon God Little, and returns to the first-person narrative of a young man set apart from his culture, this time in Europe. Vernon God Little was translated in over 40 territories worldwide under a variety of titles. Awards Published in 2003, the novel was awarded the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction which included the £50,000 prize. Upon winning the prize, Pierre said that the money was “a third of what I owe in the world” and promptly used it to repay old debts. It also won the first novel award in the 2003 Whitbread Awards. Crits The British Mail On Sunday wrote: “Not since first reading John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece A Confederacy Of Dunces, have I laughed so much, or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice.” Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn wrote: “Read Vernon God Little not only for its dangerous relevance, but for the coruscating wit and raw vitality of its voice.” The Times wrote: “A satire brimming with opprobium for.. [the] demi-culture of reality television, fast food and speedily delivered death… a bulging burrito of a book.” John Carey, Merton professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and chairman of Booker judges in 2003 said: “Reading [Pierre's] book made me think of how the English language was in Shakespeare’s day, enormously free and inventive and very idiomatic and full of poetry as well.” Theodore Dalrymple wrote that the novel “was a work of unutterably tedious nastiness and vulgarity” that “manifested itself even in its first sentence, and grew worse as the first paragraph progressed”; Dalrymple described Finlay as “a man with no discernible literary talent whose vulgarity of mind was deep and thoroughgoing”. More information: DBC Pierre Top